by Tim Weaver
If he was so pissed off, why agree to be interviewed at all?
She looked at Roxie again and a deep, pervading sense of unease spread inside her, like an oil slick.
Could Johnny really have lied to her?
Why?
She closed her eyes, hating the idea, an image forming in her head of the snowglobe he’d bought her. She could see Kyra tilting it and letting it settle again, over and over, the night before Rebekah had come to the island. She could still see her brother, with the gift box in his hands, a couple of days before that, when he’d handed it to her. I saw it and thought of you, he’d said.
Her mind went even further back, digging through her best memories of him, trying to bathe in the certainty of them, and one in particular lodged with her.
When Rebekah was seventeen, in her second year of A levels, Johnny had flown to London to visit her. He’d managed to sell a 5,000-word short story to a literary magazine on the west coast – the one and only time he had sold any of his writing to anyone – and had been paid $4o0 for it. When he talked to Rebekah on the phone, elated at the idea of being published, he told her he was going to use the cash to come and see her. She told him he didn’t need to, that he should spend the money on himself – but he insisted. ‘I miss you,’ he said, and the more she and Johnny talked, the more excited they became. She’d show him the city again, all the things that had changed since the family’s move to America; and when she was at school, he would go and see all the literary sights – the British Library, Baker Street, Highgate Cemetery, the homes of Keats, Dickens and Samuel Johnson.
He landed on a rain-soaked morning, and Rebekah met him in the arrivals hall at Heathrow, both so glad he had come. They laughed on the Tube, catching up on the things they’d missed in each other’s lives. They dropped off his bag at the cheap, dreary B&B he’d paid for, close to where Rebekah boarded at school, laughing about the sinister-looking woman on Reception and renaming the place the Bates Motel. Then they went into the city and straight to the pubs, Rebekah high on the adrenalin of being with her brother, Johnny slightly delirious with jet lag. He told her it was so good to be back in England, to be able to share those moments with her in the country they’d grown up in. He said exactly the things that Rebekah expected from Johnny: kind words, earnest, loving. He might not always be demonstrative, he might never say I love you, but he didn’t need to: like their dad, he could convey what he felt in the way he looked at you, in the simple act of spending all the cash he had on a flight.
But then she came crashing out of the memory, and her thoughts darkened, and she remembered the last day of the season. She remembered how he’d told her that the island shut on 31 October when it actually closed the day before. Even though she’d been confused the night she’d made it to Helena in the rain, questioning her brother’s motives – a man she thought she’d known better than anyone – she’d eventually put it down to a mistake, not deceit. Mixing up dates, forgetting the fine detail, those were traits of his, and always had been. He was a dreamer. His mind wandered because he was creative. She trusted her brother. He wasn’t capable of deception, of cruelty, of such damage.
But then that trip to London crawled back into her head.
It had been perfect for two days, the pair of them as happy as Rebekah could remember them being. They went to museums, ate fish and chips beside the Thames, talked for hours and laughed even more. And then, on the third night, they went out with Rebekah’s friends. She’d been so desperate for them to meet her brother. She’d been so proud of him.
It turned into one of the worst nights of her life.
The Stranger
‘There didn’t seem like there was anything up with Rebekah?’
Travis shuffled forward to the edge of the couch, pen poised above his notebook. Opposite him, Noella Sullivan shook her head and glanced at the camera he’d set up: ‘Honestly, she seemed fine. She was a little stressed, I guess – you know, leaving the kids, having to make it over to John’s for a certain time – but nothing that would have made me concerned.’
They were in Noella’s living room, small but homely, paintings of Irish vistas on the walls. There were shelves with a few photographs, all of her with the Murphy family, and in particular her with Rebekah Murphy’s girls. Travis gestured to the pictures and said, ‘You were obviously the designated babysitter.’
He said it with a smile, but her reaction was small and stoic. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I love those girls. It’s important now for them to have some stability.’
Travis nodded, trying to work out if there was something to interpret in her choice of response, then took a sip of the drink he’d asked for. He winced. Noella had made him a mint tea. It was something Gaby had put him on to, and that he’d frequently lapsed from drinking, but four days out from retirement he was giving it another go.
‘Why are you drinking something you don’t enjoy?’
He glanced at Noella, who seemed amused now. He hadn’t seen her smile before: she was pleasant, appeared concerned for the wellbeing of her friends, but it was clear she’d developed a tough hide. He knew she was thirty-six, but she was greying, looked older, more fortified. He wondered what had happened in her life to make her that way. He smiled again and said, ‘My daughter tells me I need to cut back on my coffee intake.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘So Rebekah never said where she and Johnny were going?’
‘It was such a rush, all I got out of her was Long Island.’
‘If it was a rush, that suggests they had to be somewhere for a specific time,’ Travis said, but it wasn’t really a question, more a statement.
‘Johnny had an interview lined up.’
‘Did he say with who?’
‘No. Bek just said it was for the book he was writing.’ Noella paused, thinking, her expression pensive. ‘I guess they had to leave early to meet whoever Johnny had set up the interview with.’
‘And you said you heard from her later on?’
‘Yeah, a couple of times.’
‘And she didn’t say anything then?’
‘About where she was?’ Noella shook her head. ‘No. When I say that now, it sounds crazy, but it just never came up. She was having a hard time being so far away from her girls – the furthest she’d been from them was the hospitals in the city, one shift at a time – and I don’t think it ever dawned on her that she might feel so heartsick for them. So we were dealing with that. And then there were a lot of problems with reception.’
‘The calls kept dropping out?’
‘Dropping out, or just dying.’
Travis was quiet as he made some more notes, trying to think about places on Long Island where the reception might be unreliable. It was hard to imagine there were many: almost three million people lived in Suffolk and Nassau counties, seven and a half if you factored in Brooklyn and Queens. The island was big. It was populated and connected. He tapped his pen against the notebook, thinking about the early start Johnny Murphy and his sister had made. ‘Did Rebekah mention anything about getting a boat?’
Noella frowned. ‘A boat?’
‘Maybe a ferry?’
She shook her head. ‘No, nothing like that.’
Travis put a question mark next to the word ‘Ferry’. He’d have to look into it some more. He knew there were hundreds of islands in the Long Island Sound, but a lot of them weren’t accessible, and even those that were you could normally only get to on ferries that sailed from Connecticut, not Montauk. Plus, so far, there was no evidence that the Murphys had got a boat anyway.
‘Can’t you just check her cellphone records or something?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’ve made a request for them.’
‘Then you can see where she went.’
He nodded. ‘That’s the hope.’
He forced down more of his tea, then changed tack. ‘You were rushed into the ER back in September, is that right?’
She frowned, thrown by the change of direction.
> ‘And Johnny came to see you at the hospital that night?’
‘He did, yeah. He was brilliant.’
Travis flipped back in his notebook to the timeline he’d written down, including the two hours and twenty-eight minutes that Murphy had had his cell switched off. ‘Do you know if Johnny was there the whole time?’ he asked.
She frowned again.
‘He didn’t leave to go anywhere else?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not that I remember.’
‘Were you conscious the whole time he was there?’
She was trying to think. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said eventually.
‘Did any other friends or family come to see you that night?’
‘My boyfriend was away and my dad is very sick and frail, so it was just Johnny,’ she said, and a sadness seemed to press on her. Travis glanced at the photos in the living room again: her father was her only family. Rubbing the side of her face, Noella said, ‘They put me out.’ She shrugged. ‘So I guess I was unconscious for a part of the time John was there. Why are you asking me that?’
‘It’s just a loose end, that’s all.’
‘A loose end to do with my appendectomy?’
Travis smiled. She was smart. ‘I’m just trying to get an idea of the type of person he is.’
Noella eyed him, as if she still didn’t really believe him, but then she gestured to a photograph on the wall, of her, in the centre, with Murphy, his sister and two other men – one younger, one older. Travis knew who they were because he’d already built a background on the entire Murphy clan. He’d even looked into the death of the younger brother, Mike, but there had been nothing suspicious in it, just stupidity: a young man driving an expensive car way too fast.
‘You want to know what type of person Johnny Murphy is?’ Noella said, a little distance in her voice now, her eyes locked on the photograph of her with the family. ‘Just ask around. Everyone will tell you exactly the same thing. He’s basically the kindest, gentlest, most generous person you ever met in your life.’
Travis got home and watched the interview with Noella, then cooked some pasta, because it was easy and he was tired. At 7 p.m., he set up his laptop and waited for a Zoom call. It came through at 7.15.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ Kirsty Cohen said.
She was a plain-looking woman in her late thirties, with auburn bangs and a pale complexion. Travis remembered from the first time he’d interviewed her – in the weeks after Louise had gone missing – that she was also energetic, helpful, and talked a lot. She’d clearly come straight from work: she still had her ID around her neck.
‘It’s no problem,’ Travis replied, and flipped to a fresh page of his notebook. ‘What’s the weather like down there in Baltimore?’
He’d asked the question to put her at ease, but Kirsty didn’t stop talking for ten minutes about all the snow they’d been having in Maryland. Eventually Travis had to cut her off. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said, ‘and I wanted to talk to you about it.’
‘Oh. Okay. Is there news on Louise?’
He paused, trying to figure out how much to tell her. He decided to give her the truth. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but your friend Rebekah Murphy, and her brother Johnny – they’re both missing.’
Her face dropped. ‘What?’
‘So you didn’t know?’
‘No. No, I had no idea.’
‘They disappeared seven weeks ago.’
‘What?’ she said again, and brought a hand to her mouth this time. ‘Are you kidding? That’s awful. What happened to them?’
‘I’ve only been working their case for a day,’ Travis said, his eyes drifting to a calendar on the wall, and he thought, I’m only going to be working it for three more.
‘Detective Travis?’
He pulled himself back into the room. ‘So, I take it you haven’t heard from Rebekah?’
‘No. No, not at all. I tried calling her a month ago, maybe more …’ Kirsty faded out. ‘Actually, it must have been around the time they went missing, if you’re saying it’s been seven weeks. I tried calling her and she didn’t answer, so I called again a couple of times. I wanted to talk to her.’
‘About what?’
‘Well, you know …’
She was stumbling over her words.
Travis waited her out.
‘Well, you know, about Johnny.’
‘What about him?’
This time, there was a flash of guilt in her eyes.
‘Kirsty?’
‘You were asking me questions about him, about what Louise thought of him when they went out on those dates, and it only occurred to me after that, well, you must be thinking … you know, that he’s a suspect in all of this.’
Travis let her carry on.
‘I just wanted to talk to Bek about it.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I just wanted …’ She grimaced a little, then the connection dropped for a second, her image juddering. ‘I wasn’t trying to warn him about anything, I promise. I just wanted to …’
Again, Travis said nothing, just waited.
‘I wanted to hear what she thought, that’s all. I mean, she knows him better than anyone, and for him to have possibly been involved in something like Louise going missing …’ She stopped again. ‘It just seemed totally crazy. I know Johnny a little bit, and I knew Louise would love him. I mean, I was right, because she told me after their first date that he was a really nice guy. He could be shy, quite introverted, but he was a real gentleman, to me, to Louise, to everyone. Rebekah always spoke real highly of him too. But, then, I don’t know, I just kept … I kept going back to …’
She faded out.
Travis shuffled forward in his seat, wanting to hear what had gone unspoken. When she didn’t say anything, he prompted her: ‘What? You kept going back to what, Kirsty?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘I just kept thinking about this one thing Bek told me, when she was really drunk, back when we were in college.’
Travis leaned even closer to the screen. ‘What thing is that?’ he said.
‘There was this incident, way back in the late nineties.’
‘An incident?’
‘In London.’
‘London?’ Travis frowned. ‘London, England?’
‘Yeah,’ Kirsty said. ‘Bek said that Johnny went a bit …’
She faded out, grimaced.
Travis waited.
‘She just said that something happened that night – and when she looked at him, it was like looking into the eyes of a stranger.’
Before
Rebekah had chosen the pub because she knew Johnny – as a big fan of the movies – would love it. It was on Holloway Road, less than a mile from her halls, and built into the side of a beautiful, grade-two-listed art-deco cinema called the Regal. The pub was housed inside the cinema’s original foyer, and it gave the décor a wonderful bygone elegance, with its hardwood stairs, marble floors, and geometric and sunburst patterns. On the wall behind the bar, there were huge posters for Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, which was another reason Rebekah had chosen the place: Johnny had loved both movies, watching them on repeat growing up.
‘Wow,’ he said, as they entered. ‘This is so cool.’
‘I thought you’d like it,’ Rebekah replied. Because they’d arrived at the pub early it was relatively quiet and they got to pick the best spot: a curved booth with a metal table built from the bones of an old film projector.
‘This is amazing,’ Johnny said, as they slid into the seat. ‘Thanks so much for bringing me here, Bek. I love it.’
Rebekah’s friends started to arrive just after five, and although Johnny was never great in crowds, particularly with people he didn’t know, he put on his best show for her. He was sweet, funny, let Rebekah tell stories of when they were young, listened politely as the conversation moved to school, to the teachers there, to gossip about other stu
dents. At one stage, maybe four drinks in, Rebekah leaned in and asked if he was all right, and he told her he was enjoying himself. That wasn’t entirely true, she knew: a few of her friends would bring him back into the discussion sometimes, but most of them – like Rebekah herself – were seventeen, armed only with fake ID, bravado and a youthful belief that their story was the funniest, and most important, and the only one that deserved to be heard.
As the night went on, the pub became busier, eventually filling with Arsenal and Spurs fans. A north London derby was kicking off at Highbury at 8 p.m., and although uniformed officers were stationed all the way along Holloway Road, principally in an effort to keep the two sets of fans apart, some had scurried into the Regal unseen and were shoulder to shoulder at the bar.
Forty-five minutes before kick-off, Rebekah offered to get another round of drinks, because the Regal always stopped asking for ID once the crowds were two deep at the bar.
As she was waiting, a guy in his late forties, his gut straining against a Spurs shirt, backed into her, spilling his pint on his boots. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he muttered, turning, angry, his expression fierce. But when he saw Rebekah, his ire instantly dissolved. He looked from her breasts to her face. ‘You all right, love?’
She just nodded.
‘You going to apologize, then?’
‘For what?’
‘What do you think?’ He gestured with the pint glass, lager sloshing around inside. ‘I spilled half my beer on my shoes because you backed into me.’
‘You backed into me.’
Behind him, a friend peered over his shoulder. ‘What we got here then?’ the friend said.
‘A stuck-up bitch by the look of things,’ the man said, and winked at Rebekah, as if she should lighten up. ‘Just messing. You out with mates?’
‘What’s that got to do with you?’
The man looked beyond her, his eyes scanning the pub, trying to find the table where Rebekah was sitting. And then he spotted it: it wasn’t hard because, aside from Johnny, it was filled with seventeen-year-old girls.